A lottery is a game of chance in which winners are selected by a random drawing. It is a popular form of gambling in which participants pay a small sum of money to have a chance of winning a large jackpot, often administered by state or federal governments. It is also a decision-making process used in sports team drafts, the allocation of scarce medical treatment, and many other situations. Although a variety of different types of lotteries exist, there are some common elements that they all share. First, there is a prize pool that contains the prizes to be awarded. This is typically divided into several parts, including costs for organizing and promoting the lottery, profit for its organizer or sponsor, and a percentage that goes to the winning players.
Secondly, the prize pool must be sifted through to select the winner(s). This is usually done by assigning each ticket or entry a number. A computer system then combines all the numbers and matches them with the prize categories. The winner(s) are then announced and the prize money is distributed.
The word “lottery” may be traced back to the Low Countries in the 15th century, where it was common for towns to organize public lotteries for a range of purposes, from building town fortifications to helping the poor. In fact, the term seems to have come from Middle Dutch loterij, a compound of low (lot) and erie (fate or fortune), derived from the old Dutch noun löte, meaning “fate.”
Lotteries rose in popularity throughout the world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, fueled by economic growth and rising incomes. As they did, however, they ran into a problem. When populations grew, inflation increased, and wars raged, balancing the budget became more difficult for states that provided generous social safety nets. To maintain their services, legislators needed to raise taxes or cut spending, both of which were extremely unpopular with voters.
For the politicians, lotteries appeared to be a miracle solution. They allowed them to raise hundreds of millions of dollars without raising taxes, and thereby avoid a bruising election battle that would probably have resulted in defeat. In addition, these money-making machines were a good way to bring in new revenue without increasing the rate of existing taxation or raising new taxes on the poorest citizens.
Cohen argues that this reasoning was flawed in two key ways. First, it overlooked the fact that the wealthiest people buy fewer tickets than the poorest—and spend a smaller percentage of their income on them. Second, it ignored the long-standing ethical objections to gambling. Many of these objections revolved around the notion that government shouldn’t profit from a business that attracts the same group of people that uses heroin.
Moreover, it neglected to acknowledge that even in the early days of the American lottery, the prizes could be highly undesirable. For instance, a ticket won in the early nineteenth century led to the liberation of Denmark Vesey, a formerly enslaved man who used his winnings to foment slave rebellions in South Carolina and Virginia.
